Dissident Voice

Last
week the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement chartered a flight to
deport over 20 immigrants including nine Palestinians. The deputy director of
BICE, the agency formerly known as the INS, defends its practices in a debate
with Ann Benson of the Washington Defenders Association Immigration Project and
Subhash Kateel with Families for Freedom in New York City.

In
the past two years, non-immigrant residents in the US from more than twenty
countries targeted for special registration have faced the specter of
indefinite detention and possible deportation. When non-citizens go before an
immigration judge, the court is not required to appoint legal representation;
80-90 percent of them end up without lawyers and so are unable to contest
deportation orders that may not be warranted. Detainees generally face
deportation because of visa violations or criminal charges and are sent back to
their countries of origin—if those countries accept them.

The
situation of Palestinian detainees is unique in that they are a stateless
people and so have no home country authorized to take them in. The US
Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have worked out a deal, however,
with Israel, Jordon, and Egypt to facilitate return of Palestinian deportees to
the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority is also facing pressure to
permit deportees to b e sent to refugee camps. Immigrant rights groups say the
US should not deport Palestinians to an area wracked by violence.

Last
Tuesday, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported nine
Palestinians from a detention facility outside Buffalo, New York on a chartered
a plane along with Egyptians and Jordanians. 54-year-old Palestinian Munir
Lami, who is blind and diabetic, was among those deported—he had served time in
prison for welfare fraud and a visa violation but was released until July
because BICE apparently did not have sufficient documentation to deport him.
Upon arriving in Jordon last week, he was placed in a prison without the
knowledge of his family for several days. Lami has lived in the United States
for 16 years and has raised 9 children and 8 grandchildren here.

David
Venturella, Deputy Director for Detention and Removal Operations at the Bureau
of Immigration and Customs Enforcement

TRANSCRIPT

AMY
GOODMAN: We turn first to Subhash Kateel, of Families For Freedom in New York
City. Can you tell us more about the case of this man, of Munir Lami.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: Munir Lami is another person who is part of just a greater attempt of
what we've been seeing over the past couple months in which a while back in
June 2001 the Supreme Court had ruled indefinite detention was
unconstitutional. By saying that, it said that stateless people and people that
were unable to be deported within a reasonable amount of time were to be
released from immigration custody. In that process, folks from Guyana, folks
from Cambodia, folks from places like Somalia, places like Palestine, were
released from I.N.S. custody because they were unable to be deported. What we
have seen over the past year is the I.N.S. is openly flouted the Supreme Court
decision and the face of the Supreme Court decision. It has really put pressure
on consulates around the world and on countries around the world to take back
stateless folks, take back people that they refuse to take back in the past.
The Lami case is another situation where there is a person released because he
couldn't be deported, and Supreme Court has said that trying to keep him in
custody is unconstitutional. And then they go ahead and put pressure on the
Jordanian government, on the Egyptian government, on the Israeli government to
find other ways to take them back into the country.

AMY
GOODMAN: Can you explain what happened to Munir Lami when he was deported to
Jordan? Why did he end up in prison there?

SUBHASH
KATEEL: Why he ended up in prison is actually anybody's guess. What we do know
is that in some countries like Egypt and Israel and Jordan and also in some of the
Caribbean countries, when folks are deported, either when they are deported
because they're not citizens of the stated country or being deported for prior
criminal conviction, they’re sometimes held by government authorities or
because of the political activities they're involved in before, in their
countries of origin. Why Mr. Lami was detained by Jordanian officials, I'm not
exactly sure. The United States is signatory to the convention against torture.
One of the things the convention against torture states is that you can't send
individuals back to situations where they will face prison and torture. So in a
lot of ways the United States is violating its own laws by deporting
Palestinians back to Palestine, number one. But also deporting Palestinians and
deporting other stateless people back to countries where they most certainly
face persecution and most certainly face possibility of being imprisoned and
tortured.

AMY
GOODMAN: We’re also joined on the telephone by David Venturella, who is Deputy
Director for Detention and Removal Operations at the Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, as well as Ann Benson, who is the directing attorney with
Washington Defenders Association Immigration Project. Can you respond to this
case, David Venturella?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Well, first--

AMY
GOODMAN: Could you come off your speakerphone please?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Sure, no problem. First of all, the gentleman was correct in citing
Supreme Court decision regarding the indefinite detention. However, we do have
an obligation to continue with pursuing an individual's removal whether they're
in custody or not. And as he characterizes, Zadvydas decision by the Supreme
Court did put pressure on the federal government to continue to pursue removals
of individuals who had gone through the process and had their day in court and
had an order of removal issued by an immigration authority. So we continue to
pursue removals even though we may not be authorized to detain them for longer
periods of time based on the Supreme Court's ruling. So he's correct there. If
I could clarify that the U.S. government will still pursue the removal of
individuals who have outstanding orders. The ruling does not afford them status
in the United States. In fact that removal order is outstanding until it's
enforced. We as immigration officers have to enforce the law. And we do abide
by all decisions by supreme courts and other authorities, but our mission is to
remove individuals who have an outstanding removal order.

AMY
GOODMAN: Ann Benson, can you respond to this?

ANN
BENSON: Well, I think that the point that I would like to respond to is the
people getting their day in court. I think that one of the things that is most
important to highlight here is that, yes, that's what the government is doing.
They are actually trying to affect what they believe to be valid orders of
deportation when they continue the process of trying to remove folks. But I
think that it's important to highlight perhaps a step further back in terms of
the quality of the day in court that people get. I think that as you have
highlighted, Amy, 80 to 90 percent of the people who actually appear in removal
proceedings, as they are now called, are unrepresented, particularly if they
are detained and if they are facing deportation for any type of criminal
violation. Under the process of law that we have here, deportation and removal
is still considered to be a civil proceeding and so folks are not entitled to
have lawyers appointed for them if they cannot afford counsel. And without
effective lawyering, it's very hard to have your day in court in a way that is
very meaningful, in a way that actually could mean that you could challenge the
laws that are being applied to you. And I wasn't specifically involved in Mr.
Lami's case, but I note from some of the facts that have been provided to me, I
seriously question the due process of law that was afforded to him. And that if
him and so many other folks without adequate legal representation, it's really
impossible to end up with anything other than an order of deportation.

AMY
GOODMAN: Could you respond to that, David Venturella, of the Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Well, I'm not going to debate whether or not--

AMY
GOODMAN: Off your speakerphone, please?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: I don't think it's the speakerphone. I just think it's my phone. As
far as the process in whether or not he had his day in court as the young lady
stated correctly, these are civil proceedings. There's no obligation to provide
a government-appointed attorney, that's the difference between the civil
proceedings and criminal proceedings. However, the immigration court which is
not overseen by the Department of Homeland Security but by the Department of
Justice, the judges there do inform the individual of their rights, they do
give them opportunities to seek counsel, they grant a number of continuances to
allow for this opportunity. It's up to the individual to procure the services
of adequate counsel.

AMY
GOODMAN: What does it mean to see they give them the right to seek counsel?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Give them the opportunity to seek counsel.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Individuals are informed of the charges against them in the notice
to appear which is a charging document that the Immigration Customs Enforcement
Bureau issues to individuals saying what violations of the immigration statutes
are being charged with. And an immigration judge reads those charges, asks that
the individual understands them, asks them if they have counsel. If not, and
the alien wishes to seek counsel, in most cases the immigration judge will
grant a continuance to allow for the individual to procure the services of
legal counsel.

AMY
GOODMAN: Ann Benson, do you find that to be the case with the thousands of
people who have been detained now?

ANN
BENSON: I just actually spent last Thursday in the immigration court
proceedings that were held in the detention center here in Seattle. What's
interesting is that, yes, the immigration judge does read the charges and gives
people the opportunity to seek counsel and a continuance-- oftentimes it’s a
week, a one-week continuance to get counsel. The thing is that they could give
people continuances into the next millennium to get counsel, but if you are in
the detention center and you have very significant language limitations and you
have very little money or no money, it doesn't really matter. And the charges
are read to people in English. My experience after doing this for 13 years is
watching people in detention who are extremely distressed because of the
situation that they're in and the separation that they're already enduring from
their families, is they're very much like deer in the headlights, in many
respects. It's important to remember that immigration law is perhaps one of the
most complicated areas of law in our system. And my experience is that even
immigration counsel, particularly when you're dealing with people who are
facing issues of detention and removal for criminal convictions, it’s such a
complicated area of law that without counsel it's impossible to really think
that you're going to get any kind of day in court. And people simply aren't
able to get counsel. There aren't adequate public interests organizations that
can meet the need and as we have already adequately talked about here, there is
no process whereby people are appointed attorneys. So what happens oftentimes
after the second continuance and people haven't been able to get lawyers, the
judges will simply go forward with the process. And the attorney general, who
has the authority over the immigration courts at this point, has recently
imposed case completion goals on the immigration courts and so, the immigration
judges are very focused now on moving the cases forward through their docket in
a very rapid manner because the case completion goals require I think it's a
30-day completion for cases in detention. And so what has begun to happen in an
increased way than from where it was before, is that the immigration judges,
because of these pressures, are extremely focused on moving people through the
system as rapidly as possible.

AMY
GOODMAN: David Venturella of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
what about the issue of the Supreme Court ruling that indefinite detention is
unconstitutional. There are people in detention facilities now like Farouk
Abdel-Muhti, who is a Palestinian man who has been moved from New Jersey to
Pennsylvania detention facilities who has been in prison for well over a year.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Before I address that I want to address a couple of things that
were raised. In the last couple of years we've stepped up our efforts to allow
pro bono organizations and other legal advocacy groups into our facilities to
conduct “know your rights” presentations to detainees who may not have legal
counsel available to them at the point that they're arrested. We also provide
all of our detainees with lists of legal services, we've increased the access
to phone and to legal presentations. And I think that one thing that the lady
from Washington points out is that there are not enough pro bono organizations
who can provide those types of services. But we do everything we can to provide
at least the access to these individuals and provide them with information
about the process. And it comes from outside attorneys not government
attorneys, not government-appointed officials advising them of their rights in
the process, it's immigrant advocacy groups or pro bono organizations that
provide that information to them. That's one point I wanted to clarify. On the
case that you mentioned, I'm not familiar with all aspects of that particular
case, but individuals, the whole process can take days or years. The Supreme
Court decision talked about at the point an individual received a removal order
that the time allotted was about six months. However, if there are
circumstances which permitted the detention beyond that, that was permissible,
but there had to be very specific reasons to hold someone beyond the customary
or normal six months. So in the case that you referred to again, I'm not sure
what stage he is in in his removal proceedings, but if he's on an appeal it
could take several months and/or years before he gets a removal order.

AMY
GOODMAN: Ann Benson, what about this issue of indefinite detention?

ANN
BENSON: Interestingly, the indefinite detention cases originated here in
Seattle with the federal public defender offices that they have here and the
federal public defenders were the folks that argued that before the Supreme
Court. I'm somewhat familiar with that litigation. Interestingly, while the
Supreme Court in the Zadvydas case said that persons cannot be held for longer
than six months if they can't be deported, what we have experienced here in
Seattle, and I know it's happened around the country, is that the government
has continued to resist efforts to actually release them in compliance with the
law. In virtually every case that we have here in Seattle, the federal public
defenders are having to go back into federal court and do habeas corpus
petitions for each one of these folks in order to actually get the government
to comply with the efforts to release people pursuant to the Zadvydas Supreme
Court decision.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: We've released thousands of people since that decision came out.
And, yes, there are habeas challenges in court that come before the six-month
removal period. But to say that across the country we've continued to detain
people in defiance of the Supreme Court order is just unfounded. I don't have
the statistics in front of me, but I can almost assure it's in the thousands
that we've released because of the Zadvydas decision.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: Many of those cases where people have been released, they actually had
to petition for their own release, they actually had to be insisted upon their
own release.

AMY
GOODMAN: Subhash Kateel of Families for Freedom.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: If you look at the Zadvydas decision and the regulation that came
out afterwards that they do have to make a request to be released based on the
Zadvydas decision. That they view that their removal is not immediate or in the
foreseeable future. That is correct. They do that in the form of a habeas
petition. But they do it the day after they get a removal order, not six months
after. But again the point is, we release thousands of people in compliance
with the Zadvydas decision.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: The way folks like Munir Lami and the other folks who were picked up in
the recent round of Palestinian folks, out of I.N.S. custody, is really
telling. A lot of people that we’ve talked to, both in the Palestinian
community and other communities, that have been rounded up in the past week and
reported, were told to report to the I.N.S. for either their monthly reports,
not told they're going to be detained when they report, and in some cases were
approached by I.N.S. agents at their homes. I mean they're not given time to
even tie ends up over here before they leave. They’re not given time to sit and
eat with their family before they leave. Often their lawyers aren't told that
they’re going to be detained when they check in for their monthly appointments.
To say this is a transparent process is actually not true especially for the
family members that go through this. In the past week alone we've heard of
people that have been asked to check in with the I.N.S. and had received
letters where--I'm sorry with the Department of Homeland Security--with the
Bureau of Immigrant and Customs Enforcement, they were told to check in, not
told they were going to be detained, come with their travel documents, and
then, within a one-week period, are processed for deportation back to their
home country. This is not an open and transparent process at all.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: They all have--

SUBHASH
KATEEL: Excuse me, sir.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Hold on. They all have outstanding orders of removal when they're
released they're told to report in that they need to pursue travel document for
their removal. Ultimately, if we're successful they will be removed from the
United States. People are called in instead of showing up at their homes or
pulling them out of their jobs or elsewhere.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: People are called for what they believe are monthly check-ins. They’ve
checked in once a month for the past 12 months. Then all of a sudden on one
random check-in they're detained into custody. In many cases they’re not given
a chance to contact their family and in many cases their attorneys don't even
know. For example, a lot of the Palestinian detainees that were transferred to
Batavia, their attorneys weren't notified that they were being transferred to
Batavia, which is in Buffalo, which is where a lot of the Palestinians were
deported from.

ANN
BENSON: I would confirm the same has been true here and as many of you may be
familiar with the Somali deportation litigation that was the case that--

AMY
GOODMAN: This is Ann Benson from Seattle.

ANN
BENSON: That the bureau of, well at the time it was still the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, either issued people these letters that were very
ambiguous and people didn't know that they weren't their monthly reporting
letters, these very ambiguous letters that essentially were luring them back
into the I.N.S. that they just show up or actually went out to their homes and
rounded them up with essentially no notice of what was happening here. That was
essentially what gave rise to the Somali deportation litigation. But it all
happened extremely rapidly, like within a period of 48 hours we had to be in
court filing habeas corpus petitions because these people were literally just
plucked off the street. They, they were people who were under orders of
supervision.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: The other thing that I want to point out is that when we notify
individuals to come into the office they have a tendency not to show up. And I
point to the fact that we have over 400,000 unexecuted removal orders in the United
States. That's the result of us trying to let the, give the individual, an
opportunity to come in on their own and affect the removal order. As a result
it's been highly unsuccessful. So--

AMY
GOODMAN: David Venturella, let me just ask a quick question.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: … supervision of their responsibilities and obligations and that
one day it may result in a removal. That order does not go away because you're
released from custody, that order is still in effect and it won't be satisfied
until the removal occurs.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: If I could just say anecdotally speaking, we’ve worked with hundreds of
families who have had to report monthly--

AMY
GOODMAN: Subhash Kateel of Families for Freedom.

SUBHASH
KATEEL: for the I.N.S. meetings, we have a couple coming up in the next couple
of weeks, and in almost every case when people think they're going to be
deported they either do report… or they leave the country on their own. The
majority of the cases that we’ve known of in the New York area. Furthermore,
the overwhelming majority of the families that we’ve worked with that have had
to check in for the monthly immigration appointments have done so. Or, if they
haven't done so, they haven’t done so because they're not clear whether they're
going to be detained. If you're telling people, well we're not sure if we're
going to detain you or not but come and check in once a month, and every
monthly decision is “Am I going to be in jail?” You're not creating a lot of
incentives for people to comply.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: I agree. There's probably not a lot of incentive. That's why there
is 80 percent of the individuals who we call in don't show up. So you said your
information was anecdotal and if it's true, that's outstanding. But our
statistics show that 80 percent of the individuals that we call in don't come
in.

AMY
GOODMAN: David Venturella, how many people are now being detained in detention
facilities around the United States?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: On average we have about 20 to 21,000 individuals detained.

AMY
GOODMAN: And how many mass deportations have there been?

DAVID
VENTURELLA: I wouldn't characterize them as mass deportations. Last year we
removed 115,000 individuals.

AMY
GOODMAN: I mean when you--

DAVID
VENTURELLA: Every day of the week people are removed.

AMY
GOODMAN: Right. I'm talking about the difference between when someone is just
put on a flight and when you charter a flight like the last one is about two
dozen. There are ones of more than 100 flights to Pakistan.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: We have either chartered flights or what we use the justice
prisoner alien transportation system. We have flights daily to central America,
to South America, to the Caribbean, where we have plane loads of up to 60 to 90
individuals. They occur daily. There's weekly schedules. So the charter that
happened to the Middle East last week was part of the normal removal system
that we have. It's true that the number to the Middle East is only two for this
year. But we envision that we'll have more removals to that region in a
coordinated effort that we did the last two.

AMY
GOODMAN: And why does the Justice Department continue to insist on not
revealing the names of the people it holds in detention and these deportations,
the mass ones where you charter a flight, are secret.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: You have to talk to the Justice Department about the release of
names. But as far as a removal, no, we don't publicize that for the safety of
our officers, for the safety of the aircraft personnel, and for the individuals
that are being removed. However the individual knows it. Their attorneys do get
notice of it. The receiving countries, a lot of other individuals who have a
need to know about the removal are told about it.

AMY
GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.

DAVID
VENTURELLA: We don't release it to concerned citizens who have gripes about it.

ANN
BENSON: Again I think the final point I'd like to emphasize is, even backing up
before this, is the due process of law that people actually aren't getting
before they actually get these orders of removal. Not only are their mass
deportations in the charter flights, there are mass deportations that we
haven't actually gotten to talk about that happen in detention where groups of
people are ordered deported all at once by an immigration judge. So I think
that the due process of law is really in jeopardy for immigrants who are in
deportation and removal proceedings.

AMY
GOODMAN: On that note, I want to thank you all for being with us. Ann Benson,
Washington Defenders Association Immigration Project; David Venturella, Deputy
Director for Detention and Removal Operations and at the Bureau of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement; and Subhash Kateel with Families for Freedom in New
York City. You're listening to Democracy Now!

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